


Earth Girls

by Prix



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Puella Magi Madoka Magica fusion, Banter, Gen, Incubators (Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica | Puella Magi Madoka Magica), Other: See Story Notes, villain swap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-07
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2021-01-25 00:11:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21347077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prix/pseuds/Prix
Summary: Clara remembers when the Daleks existed. In their absence, another enemy has taken their place, and she turns to the only Gallifreyan who remembers her for help.[Everything is the same except the Daleks are actively replaced (in power or importance or existence) by the Incubators fromPuella Magi Madoka Magica.]
Relationships: Missy & Clara Oswin Oswald
Kudos: 5
Collections: Trope Bingo: Round Thirteen





	Earth Girls

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic I did for the [Time Loop]() prompt on my [trope_bingo](https://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/) card. It is sort of playing the trope straight but really only makes sense in a meta way? Or at least in terms of implication as to what may come next... if you know the other series involved. It seems justifiable to me, okay? 
> 
> Anyway, [this](https://www.deviantart.com/ostroboggle/art/Kyubey-Sniff-Sniff-425467051) is kinda what you should imagine (a more realistic drawing rather than anime seemed to be a good idea) for the Incubators' general appearance. 
> 
> This fic is intended to be a standalone fic for the prompt, but I have thought about this concept a lot. Please let me know if you are interested or would like more information. If there is interest, I _may_ continue to write more in this "universe."

Something changed in the Universe. I’m not sure when it happened, or if that even means anything. What I do know is, once upon a time, there were creatures called the Daleks. They were a source of fear and an inspiration of terror across galaxies beyond numbering. 

And then they were not. 

I’m sure the Doctor thought he knew what he was doing. Maybe I’ll ask him someday. Trouble is, he doesn’t remember me. 

My name is Clara the Deathless, and I’m the Girl Who Remembers. 

* * *

“Hang on,” Clara says as she follows a woman dressed like a wicked Victornian governess around the console of her TARDIS. It is shaped a bit differently than when the Time Lady had come aboard. Not that Clara minds. She catches the back of her hand just before she pulls the lever that would slam them back into the time vortex. 

Missy had always been the better pilot, but Clara didn’t feel inclined to risk it. 

Missy’s hand feels soft despite the prominence of delicate bones. It feels old, the way his had when she had seen him last. The look her touch earns her is meant to be bracing, but it just reassures her that she is nearly impossible to break. 

Clara knows that is what she needs right now. 

“I need you to tell me again,” Clara explains, tone full of expectation that her request will be et with cooperation. “What do _ you _ remember?” 

She feels Missy’s grip tighten on the lever. She gives her a tilt of her head and a look of warning. 

“Oh, you are being ridiculous,” Missy tuts. 

“That’s my job. If I’ve got to be,” Clara says, unshaken. 

Missy lets go of the lever and sighs, not making it very clear whether she is giving in or indulging. 

“I remember history, my dear,” Missy replies. Having given up on moving them for now, Missy turns to the display screen. She begins navigating with great ease and speed. Clara wonders if it is because Gallifreyan is her native tongue and that it is one less barrier to figuring out the interface. She isn’t jealous. “But that’s not to say you don’t remember something different.” 

Clara presses in at her side without asking to peer at the screen. On it, she sees the briefly rotating image of a planet. Another jab at the screen, and the image zooms in through the lavender cloud cover. The file cycles through some images, most of which seem to be rendered rather than true images of the surface. There are apparently spires of mirrored glass and mazes of flowering hedgerows everywhere. 

“Doesn’t look so bad,” Clara remarks as her eyes skim over words which appear to her to be written in English. 

Missy gives Clara an exasperated look that involves putting a hand on her hip. 

“I’m meant to trust your aesthetic gut-feelings about right and wrong over my own?” Clara scoffs in response. 

“Your aesthetic preferences don’t seem to be that far off from mine,” Missy replies with a nod and a a languid look up and down. Once again, Missy has a point. Clara’s arms are covered past her wrists with long bell-sleeves made of soft fibres which are black as nothingness. Her hair has gone long again out of habit, just like she breathes out of habit. Other clothes cover her in layers, each making her both more recognizable and yet unidentifiable than the last. She is a silhouette of pale skin, big eyes, a mass of wavy hair, black, and apple red down to her knees. “You could be my daughter.” 

Clara pushes herself back from the console, hearing the soles of her boots clunk against the floor twice. 

“Don’t ever say that,” she admonishes. 

Missy waves her off with a gesture and a cluck of the tongue. 

“The point is, most thorns have flowers,” Missy explains. She looks from the screen to Clara. “I’m sure there are many who would say that dear, old Gallifrey was - is - perfectly just - a bit rough around the edges.” 

Clara feels a weight of responsibility somewhere behind her eyes. She forcibly blinks at the knowing look Missy gives her. 

“Whatever you believe has happened, it’s not your problem.” 

Clara still cannot tell if she is goading her or if she is trying to be kind. To give her a way out. Some part of her must still fear the former, because when Missy approaches her with a swish of her heavy skirt, she takes a step back. 

In response to the intrusion, Clara lifts her chin and swallows hard, ready to speak with a bite. Her hands go back to find and grasp a railing anyway. 

“Just think of it.” 

“Missy…” Clara warns, sounding a lot like the teacher she had been so long ago. At this point, there is little she can imagine doing to Missy, even if she very well could do it. But she can imagine hating her again. She gives her a scowl that disbelieves that betrayal it anticipates. “Don’t.” 

But of course there is only so long that she can ever forget.

“You can go and be with him anytime you like. You needn’t even commit suicide. You’re already dead.” 

Clara thinks she tastes something bitter and feels something burn at the back of her throat. Her eyes hurt and burn and her jaw sets. 

“Don’t you dare!” she demands more viciously. Her fingers curl into her palms. 

“It’s not as if I’m suggesting something you haven’t thought of yourself.” 

“Just stop it. It’s not _ as if _there’s anywhere I can ‘go to him’ anyway,” Clara adds. She should know better than to mention something like this to Missy. But who else is there? 

Missy scrunches her face and shrugs with one shoulder. 

“Don’t know that. My little construct only existed until it was undone. Time and the Doctor are funny that way.” 

Clara still glares dangerously at her. 

“You shouldn’t even… you have no _ right _ to talk about…” 

But even after all this time and all her slow circling of the end, she finds it difficult to talk about him. He could have come back. He didn’t. And now she doesn’t know if he exists except in her past and her memory. She presses her lips into a tight line and presses her teeth down until it hurts. 

“Oh, but when has that made a difference?” Missy chuckles. 

The pit of Clara’s stomach feels cold. She allows herself to forget, to look past their terrible history, but then she feels absolutely mad for it. 

“Heaven or eternal, peaceful silence…” Missy muses. “Either of those may be preferable to what you’re getting into…” 

“Shut up!” Clara orders. She pushes off the railing and past Missy. She goes back to the console, reexamines the cycling image of the planet, and returns her gaze to Missy only when she has willed herself back into steely calm. “Tell me what I need to know.” 

Missy shrugs again and starts to walk the circuit around the console. 

“Suit yourself,” she sighs dramatically. “For centuries, and in a way for all of time, the Time Lords’ greatest enemy has hailed from that planet, pretty-pastel place that it is,” Missy explains. 

Clara feels sickly hollow. Where her heartbeat should be trying to settle itself into steadiness, there is simply nothing. 

“And what do they do?” she feels herself ask. 

“Why, they’re mass murderers, dear. Of course,” Missy says with big eyes. She blinks at Clara in a way that might show concern. 

Clara folds her arms across her body as though she feels cold, though she isn’t sure _ what _ she feels. 

“Yes, but why do your people care?” 

“Ooh, now there’s a sharp tongue,” Missy says, lavishing uninvited praise. She turns directly toward Clara again. This time, Clara holds her ground. “But you see, all that anger you’re feeling, all that confusion - whether you’d like to kill me or kiss me - is exactly what they want.” 

Missy reaches up to thumb at Clara’s cheek. Clara lifts her arm and weakly bats her hand away. 

“So they feed on emotions? Bad ones?” Clara asks, thinking for a moment that she feels numb. 

“Not ‘feed’ exactly. They have developed technology that feeds off them like a battery. And not just the bad ones. Oh no, they need your joy and your hope, and then they harvest all that abstract energy the moment it finally gives way to despair. Then they use up your little soul like a zinc battery.” Missy makes a little flourishing motion with her hand. “Keeping all of this running just a little longer, forever and ever, into future immemorial. From some point of view, they may even be doing the right thing.” 

Clara shifts her weight uncomfortably from side to side, gaze focused and narrow. 

“So why are the Time Lords - specifically - opposed to this?” she asks a little bitterly. 

“Oh, and sometimes I think you’re clever,” Missy sighs. 

“Missy,” Clara demands. 

“Well, that’s the point of time, isn’t it? It runs out…” There is a long pause, either for thought or effect. Then Missy gives another flippant shrug. “And oh, the collateral damage… to time, not to mention the people you consume…” 

“The people _ I _ consume?” 

“Not literally. Most of the time. And I say ‘you,’ but I mean all of you. All the lovely girls, most of you so young. And I say ‘girls,’ but before you go calling me big words about that, I’d say don’t zap the messenger. They do so prefer young ladies…” 

“Prefer us for what?” Clara interrupts. 

“They’re like terrible little… cat genies,” Missy explains, pausing either to remember the English terms or, more likely, to recall Gallifreyan terms she can shoehorn through the TARDIS’s translation field. 

“Cat?” 

“Yes, cat. Or some little vermin like that.” Missy brushes her hands down along the front of her skirt. “In any case, that’s the form they prefer for appealing to sentimental nitwits like your kind. They quietly befriend you, come to you at your moment of greatest desperation, and offer you a wish of any magnitude, provided you begin to wield power beyond what your frail little bodies can endure.” 

“I know you’re making it sound sinister, but I fail to see the catch?” Clara asks, finally making the push back into fascination. She sees something in her mind’s eye. Fragments of a memory never earned. She wonders if it is real or imagined. 

“As I said, your bodies cannot contain that much raw energy You last for a while, but one day you become the abstract of all that emotion - all that joy and especially all that despair. And then you have to be destroyed, lest you consume everyone around you. And the more people caught in your wake, the more energy they harvest. It’s… a contract, dear.” Missy explains, sighing once more. “A Faustian bargain for your soul.” 

Clara takes it in and cannot say a word for a moment. Now her hand hovers over the lever. 

“Can’t say I miss the Daleks, but at least they just straightforward hated-you to death,” she remarks eventually. 

Missy sniffs audibly. 

“They do sound simpler. Possibly easier to kill,” she agrees. Clara doubts it, but that doesn’t matter. “But if you intend to change it, you’re talking about rewriting the Universe. It could take a very long time and a great many deaths…” 

Missy clucks her tongue as she goes quiet, watching Clara expectantly. 

“I can take time,” Clara retorts. 

“As you do… I do wonder how he saved you the first time. The ability it granted you - making copies all across his timestream,” Missy says, casually expressing intimate knowledge of something Clara didn’t realize she knew. 

“That happened here, too…” Clara whispers to herself. Missy ignores her. 

“That was truly a gift I never knew I would give them<” Missy is busy saying, bubbling into laughter. She claps her hands softly. “You living and burning out, over and over…” 

“What do you mean ‘you gave me’?” Clara bristles. 

“Oh, now. You were a case study and a way to save that mad fool. And you performed beyond my wildest dreams! But before you go getting cross with me about there, there is something I should point out to your little human brain.” 

“What?” Clara snaps, clinging to patience by a thread. 

Missy comes one step closer and regards Clara’s eyes with an intense gaze. 

“I told you they prefer girls, across the universe. Dozens and dozens of species… But one in particular is their favourite…” 

Clara feels it click into place, just before Missy gives it voice. 

“And, bless him, he can’t see it’s all his fault.” This time Missy does brush her thumb across Clara’s cheek. “He always has liked Earth girls.” 

* * * 

Without the Daleks, the balance of power in the Universe shifted. In their places, there arose a species known only as the Incubators. Their sworn purpose is to stem the tide of entropy in the Universe, no matter how great the cost in sentient life. 

I remember the way things were before. The Daleks were monsters we knew to be afraid of. The Incubators prey not just on our bodies but on our minds and our souls. I know the Doctor, and I know that he cannot stop them alone as they take us, one at a time, away from him. 

He can’t do it alone. 

I’m not sure why it’s me who remembers. Maybe it’s because, if this reality is keeping score, they have killed me twice. 

My name is Clara the Deathless, and I think I’m the only one who can save us. 


End file.
